Little girls, little girls, get ready. The musical “Annie” will be revived on Broadway in the fall of 2012 to mark the 35th anniversary of the original production, with Thomas Meehan, who wrote the show’s book, on board to update the script for the first time for maximum appeal to modern audiences, the producer Arielle Tepper Madover said on Monday.
“Annie,” the 1977 Tony Award winner for best musical ran for almost six years and has spawned countless tours and regional productions, but it has been revived on Broadway only once, in 1997, a production that drew harshly negative reviews and ran only seven months.
Ms. Madover declined to offer a theory about why that revival failed, but said that hers would be different because Mr. Meehan would be working with the script and “a new creative team will look to modernize the show.” The 1997 revival was directed by Martin Charnin, who also wrote the lyrics and directed the original production; Peter Marks, in his Times review of the 1997 revival, said it suffered from “a severe energy shortage.”
The story (as if anyone doesn’t know) of a little orphan girl who warms the hearts of Daddy Warbucks, F.D.R., and just about everyone except the mean orphanage manager Miss Hannigan, “Annie” will not be updated out of the Great Depression, Ms. Madover said. Rather, Mr. Meehan plans to look at the dialogue and the structure of the plot for ways to sharpen the storytelling. (Mr. Meehan won the 1977 Tony for best book, one of seven Tonys that the production received.)
“The script has never been touched since 1977, and our hope is to really make this revival for current audiences, so Tom is going to go to work on the book,” Ms. Madover said. She added that she did not know, at this point, what changes Mr. Meehan might make or how sizable they would be. If its timing holds, the revival will be opening during the final months of the 2012 presidential election so the politics of the musical — in essence, the sun will come out tomorrow — might have some resonance for voters depending on the course and pace of the economic recovery.
Ms. Madover is best known for mounting plays on Broadway (“Red” and “Hamlet” in the 2009-10 season), though she was a lead producer of the musical “James Joyce’s The Dead” on Broadway in 2000 and was a producer on some others, like “Spamalot.” She said she had acquired the rights to “Annie” because a lifelong love for the musical. It was the first Broadway show that she ever saw, in 1980 at age 8, inspiring her at first to dream of becoming an actress and eventually to seek a career in the theater as a producer.
“I saw a little girl on stage who looked just like me, and I thought, ‘Wow, if she can do that, I can do that,’” said Ms. Madover, who ended up going four more times to the original, which ran 2,377 performances from 1977 to 1983. “It’s what made me first get excited about the theater, and start having dreams that so many little girls did back then — about having a life in the theater.”
Ms. Madover declined to put a dollar figure on the show’s capitalization but said it would at least be standard for a Broadway musical, which is now $8 million to $10 million. “We’re not going to be doing a pared-down version,” she said. She also said that she had not made up her mind about whether the musical needed any stars in its cast. The original “Annie” made a well-known theater figure out of its original actress in the title role, Andrea McArdle; Sarah Jessica Parker was among the replacement Annies in the original.
“Annie has always been played by an unknown, so I’m guessing we’ll go that way,” Ms. Madover said. She also said she would be reluctant to do a television reality show about searching for a young actress to play “Annie,” like the NBC show in 2007 that contributed to the casting of the last Broadway revival of “Grease.” “That would be very hard for me to do, because we’re talking about a 10-year-old girl, and having to tell a 10-year-old that they’re not going to get the role is just a horrible idea to me,” she said. “I could see having a contest to cast Sandy the dog, though, somehow to find us the best rescue dog out there for the show.”